Well, after all the initial hassles of getting my parents hooked up to BT’s Midband/ISDN service (see parts 1 and 2 of this story), it’s finally working. And guess what? Once it’s up and running, it’s actually pretty good.
When I last left my parents, they had a freshly installed ISDN box with all the relevant sockets and wires…but no service. The main problems were that BT Midband doesn’t support Windows 2000 server through its USB interface, and that there was too much line noise on the ISDN line for a non-Win2K machine to connect at all.
Since that last time, they have had a BT engineer out who sorted out the line noise. On Wednesday I went up to visit them again, armed with an ISDN Terminal Adapter (TA). A TA is the only way you will get Midband to work with Windows 2000 Server. I bought a bog-standard BT Speedway PCI card. I could have got a non-branded card for less money, but after all of the earlier problems, I wanted something that would give me the least chance of being incompatibile.
The card was fairly easy to install in the server. The installation process tries to get you to install lots of voice, fax, voicemall, and data transfer widgets, but all I really needed were the device drivers to make it act like a modem. Once I had that going, I set up the dial-up networking connection, crossed my fingers, and….
…it worked! First time! Yay!
Continue reading “BT Midband: Just like ordinary dial-up, only without the good bits (part 3)”